Application of parallelized SOR method to electromagnetic field analysis of superconductors

PC cluster systems are becoming popular in the field of high-performance computing. The authors have been studying the electromagnetic field analysis of high T_c superconductors (HTS) by the finite element method (FEM) for AC loss estimations. Superconductors are highly nonlinear electromagnetic media, and considerable computation time is required to calculate the temporal evolution of the electromagnetic field distribution in superconductors. In this study, parallel computing techniques were applied to the electromagnetic field analysis of HTSs by the finite element method. In one of the FEM codes used by the authors, the successive over-relaxation (SOR) method, was used to solve a system of equations. This part was parallelized using the multicolor SOR method, and it helped in reducing computation time. Data are explicitly passed between the processor elements (PEs) through an MPI. First, the HTS model was analyzed under one operating condition, using the code implemented multicolor SOR method, using four PEs, and the parallelization efficiency was confirmed. Next, the generality of the efficiency of the multicolor SOR method in our numerical simulation was examined under several operating conditions, using different models.